Re: How do you manage thick guitar sustain and mud?
I leave it to the amp and/or pedals. That's what multiple channels and pedals are for. With 24" guitars my main priority is to get them holding tune, and in terms of pickups I just go for ones with weak enough magnetic fields which won't drag on the strings. It's too easy for short scales to get dragged off-pitch, especially by neck pickups. Short scale, flat-top bolt-ons will never have quite the full sustain or the clarity of longer scales or bigger bodies so when I use my Mustang or any other 24"ers, instead of trying to fix it on the guitar, out come the EQ pedals set to an M-shape, and the bass and mid knobs on the amp both get pushed up a point.
In longer/bigger guitars I often try something fancier—nearly all my guitars have some kind of 'party trick' switch—but nothing consistent, and nine times out of ten I end up just letting the natural difference between neck/middle/bridge dictate the response of the guitar and let the amp's channels handle the overall style of tone. For example my main guitar (ESP Horizon) is HSH with a Custom, Hot Rails, and Jazz. The Custom does all distorted rhythms of any type, the Hot Rails does the most distorted solos and all cleans, and the Jazz does lower-distortion leads. No tone controls, don't touch the volume controls; the three pickup positions handles it. Then my main amp, a Marshall JVM, has a clean channel, mid-gain lead, high-gain rhythm and high-gain lead all ready to go in tandem with the pickup switch. With three differently-voiced pickups and four dedicated channels, you don't need to be twisting bass cuts and whatnot.
I mean, as I said, most of my guitars do have some kind of special function to them and the majority of those are various forms of low-cut/mid-cut/bright boost switching. But most of the time they get left alone 'cause you can't be playing a note when you're twiddling a knob...
I leave it to the amp and/or pedals. That's what multiple channels and pedals are for. With 24" guitars my main priority is to get them holding tune, and in terms of pickups I just go for ones with weak enough magnetic fields which won't drag on the strings. It's too easy for short scales to get dragged off-pitch, especially by neck pickups. Short scale, flat-top bolt-ons will never have quite the full sustain or the clarity of longer scales or bigger bodies so when I use my Mustang or any other 24"ers, instead of trying to fix it on the guitar, out come the EQ pedals set to an M-shape, and the bass and mid knobs on the amp both get pushed up a point.
In longer/bigger guitars I often try something fancier—nearly all my guitars have some kind of 'party trick' switch—but nothing consistent, and nine times out of ten I end up just letting the natural difference between neck/middle/bridge dictate the response of the guitar and let the amp's channels handle the overall style of tone. For example my main guitar (ESP Horizon) is HSH with a Custom, Hot Rails, and Jazz. The Custom does all distorted rhythms of any type, the Hot Rails does the most distorted solos and all cleans, and the Jazz does lower-distortion leads. No tone controls, don't touch the volume controls; the three pickup positions handles it. Then my main amp, a Marshall JVM, has a clean channel, mid-gain lead, high-gain rhythm and high-gain lead all ready to go in tandem with the pickup switch. With three differently-voiced pickups and four dedicated channels, you don't need to be twisting bass cuts and whatnot.
I mean, as I said, most of my guitars do have some kind of special function to them and the majority of those are various forms of low-cut/mid-cut/bright boost switching. But most of the time they get left alone 'cause you can't be playing a note when you're twiddling a knob...
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